MUSIC: ADVENTURES AND WRITINGS OF JAN DUSSEK

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THERE are composers whose lives are more fascinating than their music. One very striking example of this was presented in Avery Fisher Hall on Wednesday night, when the Mostly Mozart Festival took an amiable detour from standard fare.

Jan Ladislav Dussek (1760-1812), represented on the program by his Concerto for Two Pianos in B flat (Op. 63), had the sort of life Stendhal might have invented. Born in Bohemia, Dussek studied in Prague and had a relatively respectable early career teaching piano and performing. He played for Catherine the Great in St. Petersburg in 1783, but he was said to have been involved in a plot against the Czarina. He fled to Lithuania, and a year later, toured Germany playing the glass harmonica - an instrument constructed on the same principle as fingers rubbing the rims of wine glasses.

In 1786, three years before the French Revolution, Dussek journeyed to Paris, where he attracted the attention of both Marie Antoinette and a young man named Napoleon. But such aristocratic connections did not prove helpful a few years later, whereupon Dussek fled to England. He became associated with his father-in-law in a musical-publishing business, which soon enough went bankrupt. Dussek fled yet again, to Hamburg in 1799, leaving behind a wife and a daughter whom he never saw again, and a father-in-law who was jailed for their debts.

In his later performing career - one of the first ever of a touring pianist - he was said to have been the first to play the instrument with his profile facing the audience. As kapellmeister to Prince Louis Ferdinand of Prussia he accompanied the Prince to the various battlefields of his kingdom, and beginning in 1807, he served, with more respectability, as musician for Talleyrand in Paris. The Grove Dictionary tactfully refers to him in his last months as an ''obese'' man who ''drank too much.'' He died of gout. So popular was he, that a 12- volume collected edition of his works was published just after his death.

Alas, would that the composition and the performance on Wednesday night were a quarter as remarkable as this life. But where risk, adventure, dissolution, genius and catastrophe suffuse the biography, this particular work was little more than mildly intriguing and virtuosic.

There was a genuine warmth to its late-Classical patter, and particularly in the second movement, a hint of wild escapades left untold. The soloists - Katia and Marielle Labeque - also attempted to make the most of it, with expert ensemble work and occasionally songful interchanges. But the Labecques also tended to bear down on the work with too much exertion. Dussek might have been pleased with the well- schooled energy of the players, but their demonstrative vigor made the music seem still less adventurous.

The concert also presented the Concertante for Flute and Oboe in F by Ignaz Moscheles, who led a tamer and more respectable life than Dussek; he studied with Salieri and Albrechtsberger and taught Litolff and Thalberg. He lived in London, became friendly with Mendelssohn and was a well-known virtuoso, whose piano method is still taught today. But in this case, the texture of the life fit the upright regularity of the music; the major interest of the concertante was in listening to the soloists - Heinz Holliger, oboe, and Aurele Nicolet, flute - pass pattering passages back and forth.

The conductor of the Festival Orchestra, George Cleve, brought the same skills to his role as accompanist as he brought to the two Mozart Symphonies on the program - No. 27 in G (K.199) and the ''Jupiter.'' He was professional and forthright, an intelligent constructor of phrases and the possessor of a fine contrapuntal ear. He also began each movement by presenting strongly stated ideas. But these ideas, instead of developing, tended to circle about, even in the fugal ''Jupiter'' finale, leaving the music energetic, but hardly as subtly troubling or fascinating as Mozart's life.

A version of this article appears in print on , Section C, Page 11 of the National edition with the headline: MUSIC: ADVENTURES AND WRITINGS OF JAN DUSSEK. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe